Hello everyone,
I'm very new to all of this and have never posted anything on a message board before... so you will have to be patient with me. I don't know if I am posting this on the right thread. I have been following some of your discussions and would love to ask your advice. My son, DS7 (? although he will be eight in a matter of days) took the WISC-IV in December as part of our school's acceleration assessment. He was grade accelerated in mid-year from second to third. I have been trying to talk to the gifted teacher and the school psychologist about his test results, and have gotten nowhere.
It looks like he hit the ceiling on several of the subtests for the WISC-IV. He had three 19s and one 18. But his FSIQ was only 143. However, when I looked at his scaled scores, there was a big discrepancy between his VCI and PRI (which were high) and the WMI and PSI (which were lower). According to several sites, a GAI should be calculated instead of the FSIQ. (He had a 32 pt. difference). His GAI would be a 154. There is also the issue of the extended scale for hitting the ceiling. Two of his subtest, Block Design and Matrix Reasoning, change when the extended scale is taken into account.
The school does not seem to want to take any of these considerations into account. He was gifted enough for a grade acceleration, and that is all that they seem to be interested in. They don't care whether he is MG, HG, or PG. My fear is that one grade acceleration is still not challenging him. His teacher was content to have him sit and draw detailed space battles on paper and still get 100% on all of the third grade tests. However we don't really know if we want him to be moved up any more due to social interactions. He finished third grade as a seven year old, when most of the other boys in the class were turning ten!!
Does anyone have any advice? Oh yes... I should probably mention that he is a squirmy, fidgety little boy who is always on the go. The school seems more interested in focusing on his behavior (they actually recommended ritalin even though he can sit for hours at a time while reading books or building extensive lego creations... They had the school psychologist count the number of times that he kicked his chair leg in a 30 minute window!). What do you do when your kid doesn't fit the mold that the school expects or insists on?
ebeth
